The Black & The White (29 page)

“
Horrible! It’s like I don’t
want him, but I don’t want him to want anyone else, either. I mean,
couldn’t he have chosen someone other than the girl he cheated on
me with?”

“
But, Carin, you cheated on
him too,” I said. I caught myself glancing at Andrew.

“
Yeah, but that’s different.
It was just fucking. He actually likes this girl. There’s a
difference when emotions are involved,” she explained.

Andrew glared at me. I told Carin I
would call her back.

“
When I tell you to, call
Medley Capital and get an order at the market,” Andrew said. “You
tell me when it’s done.”

I nodded. He picked up the phone and
pointed to get an order from Stephen. I did this several times
throughout the day.

At the end of the day, Andrew
congratulated me on a job well done. I even had taken the
initiative to ask Anson to give me market orders.

“
Good job, Isabelle. I’ll
mark the books from now on.” He had been marking the books for some
time now.

“
You want me to put them in
the books and reconcile?” I asked before I left for the
day.

“
No, it’s fine. I’ll take
care of the books. I’ve got to change some of the numbers anyway.
Don’t worry about it.”

On my way out, Andrew said, “Have fun
tonight and let’s do this again tomorrow. Good job.”

His approval was
validating.

Several days later, I got a phone call
from Anson’s back office telling me a trade wouldn’t settle due to
a price discrepancy. I researched the matter and forwarded them the
trade confirmation I had sent. I was certain it was correct, as I
had done the trade with Anson several days back. After we argued
back and forth, the back office sent me what had been sent to them
from my computer.

Andrew had altered my original trade
confirm. The new trade had a much higher price and a smaller size
than the one I had sent.

While Andrew was at lunch, Momofoku
Securities cc-ed me on an email requesting payment for a margin
call. A margin call from Momofuku Securities intimated that the
securities we had borrowed had fallen well below a certain point.
We either had to deposit more money into their account or liquidate
some of our positions.

I attempted to research the matter
further. The phone to our back office rang initially for Andrew and
then bounced to me.

“
Can you have Andrew give us
a call. We have a discrepancy.”

“
I can look into it, if you
want,” I said.

I still did not have the password to
get into our proprietary spreadsheet, but Andrew had it open on his
computer. I sat down, slightly nervous, and started to track the
trades.

Our prop book was well into the green.
We were up $12 million in trading profits. Our three other “secret”
books, however, were losing money, $45 million and in a sizeable,
directional position. Our “secret” books were visible only to us.
Our daily profit-and-loss statement gave only a consolidated look
at our positions. In essence, we were stealing money from the firm
by not giving it the real picture of our overall positions. From
their vantage point, our trades were only forty percent of our
overall balance sheet.

The Federal Reserve Bank was going to
issue a comment in the next month, and Andrew’s large position
showed he was betting on the Fed’s keeping interest rates the same.
What if it didn’t?

“
Oh, my God. We’re going to
blow up,” I said under my breath, nearly panting from
nervousness.

The further I dug, the more I learned
about what my boss had been doing.

Andrew had passed the poorly executed
trades to both Stephen and Anson, keeping better-priced trades in
his own book. Suddenly, it dawned on me. Andrew was doing the thing
Anson had casually mentioned so long ago at one of the many dinners
we’d had: front-running the clients in our trading account and
hiding securities not reported to our bank in the other
books.

My hands started to
shake.
No one could blame a junior person,
could they?
I considered the profit
potential of all three books if things went our way. Instantly, I
knew I would be a millionaire. Flow traders got paid a percentage
of the money they made for the firm. The average percentages ranged
from five to ten percent, a seemingly small number, but when that
was a percentage of tens of millions, the numbers became
staggering. Andrew would split a portion of that pot with me, his
employee.

If our bet was good, after the Fed
meeting, our book would make well over $100 million in
profits.

I went back to my desk and researched
on the internet what I had suspected.

Front-running is an
illegal practice of executing orders for your own account ahead of
the client’s when you know that the client’s orders are likely to
move the market. The trader then closes out their position at a
profit and a new price level.

I was full of mixed emotions. How
could he have done this to Stephen? How could he have done it at
all, when the whole system worked on the premise that a trader
never did that? I was especially upset that our success came at the
expense of Stephen’s financial position. I then became nervous at
the long-term cost of this action.

Yet in some dark corner of my heart, I
was simply excited at the idea of receiving a check for a million
dollars.

Andrew came back from lunch with a
smile on his face. “All okay, Isabelle?”

I forced a smile before
leaving.

Carin and I went to the company
cafeteria for lunch. She was talking about her ex-boyfriend falling
in love, as usual, and I was having a hard time paying
attention.

“
I mean, who goes to New
York to find love anyway?” Carin said. She paused. “Isabelle!” She
snapped her fingers at my face.

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I
said.

“
Who are you thinking about?
Are you in love?” She chuckled. “God, am I the only hag in New York
who isn’t in love? Are you thinking about Stephen? Or is it
Jeffrey?” Carin knew how often Jeffrey and I saw each
other.

I felt myself blush. “No!”

I wanted to tell Carin, but
I was nervous that hidden microphones would pick up what I said or
that someone would overhear me. There were cameras on the ceilings
and in each corner of the room. I knew that phone lines were tapped
and emails randomly read. Every move on the trading floor was
recorded.
Am I being watched right
now?

After lunch, I headed to the restroom
to do one more line before getting back to work. When I got back to
my desk, I looked at Andrew. I was trembling with fear.

Just then, Stephen called and my heart
began to race.

“
How are you doing? Drinks
later?”

I mumbled a nervous yes.

“
Congrats again! You guys
have officially become my largest source of liquidity. You guys are
trading size over there. Is there a secret that I don’t know
about?” Stephen sounded like he was teasing me. I wondered if he
knew. Why did he have to be so nice to me right then?

At the end of the trading day, Andrew
was gathering his paperwork and straightening his desk. “Good job
recently, Isabelle.”

I looked up at Andrew and timidly
asked him if we could talk.

“
Can it wait until next
week?” he asked. “I’ve got to send out some emails and do some
cleaning up in our books.”

Andrew had been staying later and
later every day after work, faxing, emailing, and configuring our
books. Although he smiled often and congratulated me, there was an
underlying tenseness about him that I hadn’t understood until I saw
the books. Now that I knew how far out on a limb he had gone, I
realized that he was just as nervous about the size of our position
as I was.

“
Okay, see you tomorrow,” I
said before I picked up my coat to leave.

“
Oh, Isabelle, can you make
it in earlier tomorrow? I need your help with things. Can you come
in at six?” he asked.

“
Sure,” I said.

Jeffrey called that night,
but I was in no mood to talk. I needed alone time, and Jeffrey
understood. I took out
Siddhartha
and read. It had always given me solace, as did my
cat.

“
When someone is seeking…it
happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is
seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb
anything…because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to
have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to
have no goal.”

I continued to thumb through pages,
reading bits and pieces, until I read a passage that especially
resonated.

“
I learned through my body and
soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that
I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths
of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn
to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of
desired imaginary world…”

I hoped I was doing the right thing at
work.

The next morning, when I arrived at
six, Andrew was already there. He was typing on someone else’s
computer adjacent to him. It was curious. I wondered what he was
doing.

“
It’s nothing. I just have
to do something,” he said.

He handed me several fax confirms to
send out. I had yet to hang up my coat and get settled. “I have a
meeting with management at 7:30 and need to do some shit before
then,” he said.

I don’t know what compelled me, but
while I waited for the fax confirms to go through I went to
Andrew’s computer, saw that his email program was open on the
screen, and started looking at his emails. There were a lot of
confirmations but also some personal notes. I read a bunch of
them.

“
She’s an idiot. Cute, but not so
sharp. Assistant to the core.”

“
What do you think I should give
her in bonus? A free weekend with me in Europe? She’s lucky I still
keep her. If she weren’t hot, she’d be out the door.”

“
Her friends are hot. That’s
value.”

“
Her tits are getting
smaller.”

“
If she’d put out, maybe I’d give
her a raise. Or show me more orders and I’ll set you two
up.”

The more I read, the angrier I got.
What was once a suspicion had now been revealed to me as
fact.

I sat at my desk, seething, not
knowing how to handle the situation. I contemplated printing the
emails out and delivering them to Human Resources but was nervous
about having invaded my boss’s privacy. I stared at my computer
screens as they lit up. Phones rang, but I didn’t answer
them.

“
Someone pick up the fucking
phone!” said a voice from across the room. The five-year trader
looked at me, but I did nothing. I was in my own mental
tunnel.

I went to the bathroom and did a line.
No one was covering the phones, a near criminal offense on the
trading desk.

Andrew finally came back to his
desk.

“
Jesus Christ, wake up! You
were supposed to cover me, damn it, Isabelle. We are getting lifted
left and right on these issues. The market moved. And fuck!” I had
left an order on the screen with one of our brokers. The market had
moved significantly and I hadn’t pulled my order, a price well
below the current market.

Andrew screamed before calling every
broker he knew and attempted to call it a bad trade or a trade not
intended for execution. No one had complied with his request to
cancel the trade and mark it as an accident. His favors on Wall
Street had run out.

“
Isabelle, get your ass in
here,” Andrew said loudly. It seemed like everyone on the floor
turned to look at me. I knew he was upset but I was indifferent. I
was stoic as he led me to the hallway, somewhat away from prying
ears.

“
What the hell is going on?
One more mistake like this and I am firing you. I should fucking
fire you right now!
Agghhh,
” he screamed.

“
Then fire me. I know you’ve
been front-running clients and cheating them on profits. I know. I
saw the prop book!”

He opened his mouth and appeared to be
in shock but said nothing. Then he looked from left to right,
observing anyone he thought had heard me.

Suddenly, he grabbed me by my forearm
and dragged me into the conference room, where he closed the
shades. I felt strong and confident after having just done a line
in the bathroom.

“
You don’t fucking know
anything. You can’t make strong accusations like that. What are you
doing?”

I explained to him what I had just
uncovered. I wanted to make mention of his emails, but in trading,
information asymmetry was the game.

His face turned red. For a moment, I
thought that he might hit me. I stood my ground, not reacting to
him, which caused him to become more infuriated.